A CRITIC AT LARGE into its stride, distressed viewers rang up the BBC in tears, pleading for the as- surance that fate would smile on the star-crossed pair and all would yet be well. I was not among these callers, but I sympathized. And I quite understood why the "Pride and Prejudice" video, re- leased midway through the run, sold out in two hours. When I was intro- duced to the novel, at the age of four- teen, I read twenty pages and then be- sIeged my stepmother's study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything. "Pride and Prejudice" suckers you. Amazingly-and, I believe, uniquely-it goes on suckering you. Even now, as I open the book, I feel the same panic of unsatisfied expectation, despite five or six rereadings. How can this be, when the genre itself guarantees con- summation? The simple answer is that the lovers really are made for each other-by their creator. They are con- structed for each other: interlocked for wedlock. Andrew Davies, who adapted the novel for television, was shrewd enough to regard his function as one of artistic midwifery-to get the thing out of the page and onto the screen in as undamaged a state as possible. After all, he had before him the example of the Olivier-Garson version of 1940 (based on a script by Aldous Huxley, among others): cold proof that any tampering will reduce the original to emollient inconsequentiality. Huxley's read- ing is disastrously winsome; even Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a good egg. Still, the adapter has to do what the adapter has to do. The pious and vigilant J aneite looks on, ever ready to be scandalized by the merest breach of decorum. Very early on, we see Elizabeth in the bedroom she shares with Jane, saying, "If I could love a man who would love me enough to take me for a mere fifty pounds a year, I should be very well pleased." This puts us in the financial picture (and we will soon be seeing Mr. Bennet sighing over his account book); but it commits Elizabeth to a predis- posed mooniness quite at odds with her defiant stoicism. Later, when the scan- dal of Lydia's elopement breaks, and Darcy gauntly takes his leave of Eliza- beth in the inn near Pemberley, Austen writes, "Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they should ever see each other again on such terms of cordiality as had marked their several meetings in Derbyshire." This translates as a one-line soliloquy: "I shall never see him again." Austen's lines show a brave face in adversity, Davies' an admission of a love Elizabeth does not yet feel. Each shifted brick threatens the whole building. TV is TV, and TV Man wants visual equivalents for every "it" and "the." And the visual is always literal, funnily enough. Any protracted passage of background explication is accorded a lavish collage. Darcy's letter to Eliza- beth, with its revelations about Wick- ham's character, inspires a scene set in Cambridge: Darcy in his gown and mortarboard, striding through a colon- nade, mounting the stairs-and surpris- ing the smirking Wickham with a half- clad scullery maid on his lap. We see Lydia and Wickham's midnight flit (la, how they cuddle in the carriage!), we see Darcy pacing the festering streets of London in search of them, and we see the runaways in their bedroom at the rude tavern. Elizabeth and Darcy don't just think about each other, they have hallucinations about each other. They've got it that bad. Davies' more minor interpola- tions are usually pretty deft and sometimes downright felicitous. But every Janeite is like the Prin- cess and the Pea. Wickham doesn't say that Darcy "refused point blank" (though he might have done-the epithet is sufficiently elderly). Elizabeth would never say (skeptically), "Astonish me!" Even Lydia would not wonderingly repeat the (in- vented) line, "A whole campful of sol- diers. . . ." Nor would she say, 'We shall have some laughs." When Elizabeth re- fuses Darcy's first offer of marriage, he notes that she spurns him "with so little effort at civility," whereas the book has the clearly superior "so little endeavour at civility." A few pages earlier, a nifty sub- junctive is lost when "I expected at least that the pigs were got into the garden" becomes "the pigs had got into the garden." I could go on. But by now I feel I am trespassing on the reader's pa- 33 it TEMPLETON GROWTH FUND . At Templeton, we believe a .. long-range investment strat- r.. egy may be the best way to -. take advantage of market advances and minimize the effects of market declines. 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